My mother grew up on Long Barn Lane in the little northern England town of Padgate, about 25 miles east of Liverpool.
She died a dozen years ago. How odd, even at my advanced age, that it tears a tiny chunk out of me to write that simple declarative sentence. Our parents are eventually gone from our lives, but never out of our beings.
Were Fran still here, I know she’d get a hoot in knowing her son’s boss, Globe owner John Henry, is the same guy who today owns Liverpool FC under the Fenway Sports Group umbrella.
Though truth be told, her allegiance, albeit minimal, rested with the legendary football squad 20 miles to the other side of Padgate.
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“Manchester United was everyone’s team,” I remember her first saying during my grade-school days, when England felt like it was located in another universe to a kid who lived and died with all things Boston sports.
“Sounds like some plumbing company to me,” I told her.
“They’re the Yankees,” she said with her accent from the industrial north.
“I’m the Red Sox,” I piped up.
“Yes, you are,” she said. “And good luck to you.”
“Yeah, I know. Good luck to me and the Red Sox."
She was 83 when she died. We shared that “good luck to the Red Sox” conversation for more than 50 years.
Mother’s Day is here, so of course I can’t help but think about Fran, especially the people and things she loved, her humor, her fascination with words (particularly poetry), her deep disdain for fools and politics.
For a country girl whose formal education ended at age 13, with the war on Britain’s doorstep, she had an exquisite ability to engage anyone in conversation and always have it be about them, or something that interested them.
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Never about her. She was a gifted talker and listener.
“What’s to know about me?” she’d say. “I’d rather learn about them.”
The older we get, if we are blessed to get “good innings” — Fran’s term borrowed from cricket — the more we see our parents in ourselves. It’s the truth we deny in our youth and young adulthood, but then inevitably, and often begrudgingly, grow to accept, sometimes even appreciate.
Our parents are us and we are them, a fact most of us find both maddening and comforting, and at times confounding. Yet to deny it is to deny the color of our eyes, and everything we see through them.
As for sports, whatever knowledge I have, I sure didn’t get from Fran.
But I did get a love of words, appreciation of a story well told or written, with the understanding that the underpinnings of a good story rest in detail, detail, detail.
Later in her life, after my dad died, I nicknamed her “Digger,” in part because she loved working in the yard, but also because digging was her mentality. Curiosity was Digger’s garden shovel and rake.
“’C’mon, don’t come to me with a half a story,” I forever will hear her saying. “You’ve left something out.”
The “something out” edit button is embedded deep in my brain. Every story has a hole, the torture of the missing piece, forever needing to be found.
Fran’s dad, John Smith, was the grandfather I never met. He was assigned to submarine duty in the first World War and became a letter carrier once he mustered out of the Royal Navy. Florence Smith watched over their five kids: Frances, Doreen, Brenda, Eyleen, and David.
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Based on what she told me, sports mattered little to the Smith kids growing up in the 1920s and ‘30s, all of them in their mid and late teens as the next great war arrived at the onset of the ‘40s. Life in Fran Smith’s Padgate came to be defined by fear, food rations, blackouts, the eerie whir of German V-1 buzz bombs cutting through the blackened night sky.
For sports, the Smith girls played some netball, the British version of basketball, which indeed had them shooting … wait for it … into a peach basket. Take a bow, James Naismith.
“Girls were the only ones who played netball,” she said, knocking the then-Celtics lover in me deep into the backcourt.
“And the boys?” I asked.
“Football,” she said. “Manchester … the Yankees.”
Among my lasting images of Fran will be Mother’s Day, but not for flowers and candy or for family dinners and Hallmark cards. But instead for the years she worked as a waitress at Hartwell Farm in Lincoln, a restaurant that ultimately burned to the ground in 1968. Its skeletal remains still stand in Minute Man National Historical Park.
Fran waitressed for the 6-8 Mother’s Days leading up to ‘68, years when I was 9-15 years old. She counted Robert Frost, the great American poet, as one of her dining “regulars” in those early years.
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She adored Frost as a customer and admired his words. On winter nights, she sometimes would read his works aloud, even while sometimes sitting alone in our tiny family den. As a girl in Padgate, her one-room schoolhouse didn’t have books to bring home. She memorized poems as a kid, some of which she still recited decades later in her fading days of hospice care.
It would be 8-9 p.m. when Fran came home on Mother’s Day, bedraggled and proudly proclaiming to be “fagged out,” her tired bones aching and white waitress uniform smudged with food stains and coffee spills.
In the kitchen’s dim light, she would sit with her aching feet soaking in Epsom salt, and sip on her warm ginger ale and draw deeply on a Viceroy. Some holiday.
She would tally her day’s earnings, with $5 earmarked to be deposited the next morning in the modest college fund under my name at the Arlington Five Cents Savings Bank.
To all the moms out there, Happy Mother’s Day. May you live long innings of good fortune, love, laughter, rewarding work, and kids who one day realize you had the game figured from the start.
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.
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On Mother’s Day, here’s to all the moms out there - The Boston Globe
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